Sunday, April 13, 2014

Things that get wet: small and large

Which annoyed many people on the forums as being very un-whale-like (and not having a lot of contrast). I discovered that these colors were actually a subset of the twelfth-most-popular color combination ever on all of ColourLovers:

So it seems that they simply picked a well-loved combo without thinking how challenging it would be for a fabric contest. OR, as the forum conspiracy theorists would have it, they deliberately picked a challenging combo to reduce the number of contest entries! (Mainly because voting can be a very tiresome activity when the number of entries creeps up much past 150 - I would love to see a chart showing number of entries vs. number of people who voted to see if there is a noticeable effect)

In any case, I did my best to work with (rather than against) the colors and did dreamy whales floating in clouds.

The first time I put it all together, I had placed the clouds randomly, hidden them, and then drawn the whales. By sheer chance nearly every whale had a cloud right over its face and it made my nose itch to look at. So I had to shift things around but I'm happy with it now. (The background pattern is the lavender again, by the way)

This came just into the top half of the entries, with 58 votes. My favorite entry was this, which I want to make into a Hawaiian-style shirt (or maybe a sundress).

For the galoshes contest, I used these colors, and then arranged stomping galoshes inside giant rain drops. (I actually shrank down that same rain drop pattern and used it inside the whale design above for the clouds)

The background uses the basic linework from the interwoven knot design I made for Maren's collection. I'm pleased with how it came out but it did not make a "splash" (har-de-har) in the contest - I got 17 votes. My favorite was this ultra-cute design with bunnies.